Richard Prince
[Artist, b. 1949, Panama Canal Zone, lives in New York.]
The other day, I saw a set of photographs I took of fountain pens in 1978 — what the hell was I thinking? It’s so precise. It looks as if I was in control. I wasn’t in control. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was so young.
Edmundo Desnoes
[Writer, b. 1930, Havana, Cuba, lives in New York.]
On emerging from the embrace of reality, photographs do not remain floating in a no-man’s land: they cross the frontier and surrender to the world of painting. They are perceived and analyzed within a sensibility refined by painting: texture, composition, equilibrium and spatial tension, eternal harmony. If painting is already this archetypal world of absolute and eternal truth, photography governs the field of the contingent, the temporal, the broken, and the scattered, the interrupted.
Diane Arbus
[Photographer, b. 1923, New York, d. 1971, New York.]
The thing that’s important to know is that you never know. You’re always sort of feeling your way.
Chip Simons
[Photographer, b. 1958, Ohio, lives in Bosque Farms, New Mexico.]
I don’t know what I’m doing. I haven’t a clue. That’s why my stuff looks so weird. I’m pretty much untrained, and I thrive on mistakes.
Daido Moriyama
[Photographer, b. 1938, Ikeda-cho, Osaka, Japan, lives in Tokyo.]
I admit that photography can capture reality effectively and in detail, viewing a part of the world through its cold, scientific lens rather than with the eyes. But I prefer taking photographs without looking through the viewfinder.
Douglas McCulloh
[Photographer, b. 1959, Los Angeles, lives in Los Angeles.]
Photographs should celebrate the contingent, the spontaneous, the incomplete, the fortuitous. Direct, unblinking vision should be coupled with deliberate indifference as to subject. The ironic goal is a scrupulous recording of whatever chance brings to hand.
Vilém Flusser
[Writer and philosopher, b. 1920, Prague, Czechoslovakia, d. 1991, Prague.]
[Photography] is an image created and distributed automatically by programmed apparatuses in the course of a game necessarily based on chance, an image of a magic state of things whose symbols inform its receivers how to act in improbable fashion.
Edward Steichen
[Photographer and curator, b. 1879, Luxembourg, Germany, d. 1973, West Redding, Connecticut.]
If it were possible for any one person or group of persons to go through a photographic finishing plant’s work at the end of a day, you could probably pull out the most extraordinary photographic exhibition we've ever seen. On almost any subject. The trouble is to find the things.
